


Compromised

by LittleLinor



Category: Cardfight!! Vanguard
Genre: Implied Sexual Content, M/M, incredibly silly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:26:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26749468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleLinor/pseuds/LittleLinor
Summary: For the first time in five years, Kouji Ibuki takes a day off work.To the Association, this must be a sign of nothing short of the apocalypse.
Relationships: Anjou Tokoha & Kiba Shion & Shindou Chrono, Ibuki Kouji/Shindou Chrono
Comments: 24
Kudos: 17





	Compromised

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is proof that I should not be enabled.  
> Please enjoy it.

The Vanguard Association, almost five years after the quiet but thorough reorganisation of its leadership, was a prosperous institution, running without any hiccup ever making it to public view, and offering good career opportunities to those who excelled in organisation or customer service regardless of their academic prowess.  
The credit for this could largely be attributed to its new leader. Although he had originally planned on passing on the title once the Association was once more stable, Kouji Ibuki had in the end solved one problem after another, gone from one project to the next, and before anyone knew it, he had been the figure the entire Association looked up to for enough years that few even really remembered when anyone else was chairman. He had been there every work day and then some, had lent an ear to those who needed it and those who in truth didn’t, and turned the Association around, not with an iron grip, but with great reliability and non negligible amounts of personal sacrifice. Even when whispers began to course that the ever-proper Chief had finally found love (there was no public announcement, but the frequent home-made lunch boxes and the increasingly lustrous quality of his hair sent the whole branch abuzz), the Association seemed to remain his topmost priority.  
Which was why, on this surprisingly chilly May morning, the entire Association was shaken to its core as shocking news of the highest order spread:  
Kouji Ibuki had taken a sick day.

The Association’s work ground almost to a halt.  
In part because Ibuki was, if great at organising, terrible at delegating, and thus, the amount of things that he needed to sign, confirm, assess, or simply give a reassuring word to before it could be sent down the chain of command and actually worked on by anyone else was staggering, and on this morning, everyone who had something to submit to him just awkwardly stood before his door, or left the papers on the rapidly growing pile of documents to be read later. And in part because people who liked both Vanguard and customer contact jobs were, statistically, overwhelmingly gossips, and the discussion of their leader’s hypothetical predicament was a much higher priority than the work that he couldn’t currently check anyway.  
An easy theory was that the wave of flu that had run wild through the city in the wake of dramatic oscillations in temperature had gotten the best of him. But anyone who had worked at the Association long enough remembered the winter of three years before, when he had shown up to work masked and crying and had conducted all his interviews by phone instead of letting anyone into the office. A broken bone would likely have stopped him for only half a day, and there were no rumours of a stomach bug going around, although food poisoning wasn’t outside the realm of plausible explanations. Someone suggested that he might have broken more than one bone, causing the whole room to go silent with apprehension, but surely if he was going to be incapacitated for an extended period of time, he would already have organised for a replacement to take his place, right?  
Right?  
(They agreed that he would, and that had he been unconscious, he would have been unable to take his sick day in the first place, and thus a semblance of work resumed, carried by the relieved belief that their ever reliable leader would be back to work in a matter of days.)

He was, in fact, back the very next day.

If gossip had been strong when he was away, it only became more powerful now that he was back, kept in check only by the work that they did, this time, actually have to do. Ibuki had never—having no superior to report to—given an explanation for his health-related absence, and instead had gone right back to work as if nothing had happened, seemingly unaffected by whatever had rendered him incapable of moving the previous day. The pile of documents on his desk grew shorter with every passing hour, and although he seemed even less talkative than usual, there was nothing else that could ever have so much as hinted that he had been incapacitated a mere day ago. There were no bandages on his face or what little was exposed of his limbs, no mobility aid, no change in his shoes, and no cast around his arms.  
The gossiping swelled again, and then eventually died out. After all, it was getting close to seven, and the natural instinct of the worker about to be released from its cage overtook the social bonding benefits of dissecting their boss’s private life, and soon, all anyone cared about was getting their work done so they could go home to some hot food and their tv programming of choice.

In the Branch’s main office, Ibuki was soon left alone, save for his almost empty pile of documents and Mamoru Anjou, who had just arrived to deliver a new pile originating from Dragon Empire on his way home.  
“You used to practice martial arts until you took this job, didn’t you?” Mamoru said, casually. “Maybe you should pick it up again. I hear they’re great for your core muscles.”  
His face devoid of any emotion, Ibuki subtly rearranged the brace that was holding his lower back in place from under his clothes, fished inside his coat pocket for a bottle of pills, swallowed two of them without any water, and went back to work.  
“… I’ll consider it.”

The bell on the door of Chrono and Ibuki’s apartment rang.  
Unlike Chrono’s phone, it could not be put on mute. And the possibility that it might be someone official or otherwise important, while slim, wasn’t altogether null, which was why Chrono, for the first time in the day that wasn’t a bathroom break, extracted himself from his ball of self-pity and shame, and went to open the door.  
“About time,” Shion said as soon as a sliver of his face became visible through the opening door. “Would it kill you to answer your phone?”  
“I told you guys I was fine,” Chrono muttered, but he let Shion and Tokoha enter the apartment, closing the door behind them only to sit at the table, lean his face on his arms, and go back to wallowing in his shame.  
“Seriously,” Tokoha huffed, taking the chair opposite him without asking, “you could at least have filled us in. We were _worried_ about you.”  
“And about Ibuki,” Shion said.  
“Yeah, _especially_ about Ibuki, but _you_ not answering is almost more worrying than that.”  
“Why do you care so much,” Chrono grumbled, raising his head just enough for his eyes to show above his arms.  
“Seriously? Are you seriously asking this? _Kouji Ibuki_ misses work, and _you_ take a day off too, and you don’t answer the phone when we ask for news—no, that single ‘we’re fine’ doesn’t count, Chrono—and then my brother tells me Ibuki’s back but you’re still holing up at home? I tried to reach you all day! How can I _not_ be worried?”  
This time, the argument seemed to get to him. Unfortunately, it only made him more ashamed, which resulted in his face disappearing behind his arms again.  
“… sorry.”  
The only time Chrono Shindou had sounded so ashamed of his life choices before, he had just almost joined a man whose ambition was to sacrifice a planet’s population in order to trap another planet’s population in an illusory world worthy of the cleanest, squeakiest moralistic children’s book. Understandably, Tokoha mellowed significantly at the sight.  
“… c’mon, Chrono… talk to us… what happened to you guys? Are you still sick?”  
He looked up.  
“Huh?”  
“Well at first we thought maybe you were looking after Ibuki… forcing him to actually take his sick day or something… but now he’s gone back and you haven’t, so whatever happened, it hit both of you right?”  
“Frankly, if he’s feeling better, he should still have stayed to look after you,” Shion said.  
“No, I—” He looked away. “No, it was just him. I had to call a doctor yesterday—but he’ll be fine. It’ll be fixed in a few days, he said.”  
Shion raised an eyebrow.  
“‘Fixed’?”  
“So why are you still acting like this? You’d think it was your fault or something.”  
“Yeah well maybe it was,” Chrono muttered.  
“What did you even _do_?” Tokoha insisted. “If you’re fine then you clearly didn’t give him food poisoning.”  
Chrono hid back in his arms.  
“Do we really need to talk about this?”  
Tokoha stared at him, bewildered. Shion sighed dramatically.  
“Our prediction came true, didn’t it? We did tell you to be careful.”  
Tokoha looked up at him. Chrono seemed determined to transform into an inanimate object—one that was, for some reason, starting to heat up as blood turned his skin decidedly redder than it was minutes ago.  
Tokoha looked down at Chrono. Then back up at Shion. Then in the general, distant direction of Chrono and Ibuki’s shared bedroom.  
“… oh my god,” she whispered, quiet with rapture at the revelation that had just hit her.  
Chrono, still not an inanimate object, stayed silent.  
“Oh my _god_ , Chrono, I didn’t even think it was actually _possible_ … how hard did you even _go_ —”  
“It’s not my fucking fault okay he just kept egging me on and—”  
Halfway standing from his chair, Chrono suddenly noticed that he had talked, and what he had said.  
He stared in silence. Shion and Tokoha stared back.  
“… please let me die in peace,” he muttered, sinking back into his chair.  
Tokoha reached across the table to pat his back. To her credit, she did seem somewhat more honest in her sympathy than Shion. Somewhat.  
“Come on, Chrono… it’s not like you to be so overdramatic. These things happen.” She paused. “… apparently.”  
Chrono groaned something unintelligible.  
“That being said, you really should be more careful. Is this how you treat an old man? You have to be delicate with him!”  
Perhaps because he knew he would only make his life even worse, Chrono did not say: “He’s only twenty five!”  
Silence fell. While Chrono contemplated how he would ever show his face in public again, much less to Ibuki himself, Shion and Tokoha contemplated logistics.  
“… so what position were you using?” Tokoha whispered after several long moments, bending halfway across the table to whisper in his ear.  
“I am _not_ talking about that.”  
“Well, once he’s recovered, I can give you the address to a shop one of my friend owns… some of their wares are a little… creative, but that’s precisely why they also have equipment that will greatly enhance safety and comfort for people whose tastes are more on the energetic si—”  
“Shion, if you don’t shut up right now, I’m disbanding this team.”

A few kilometres away, in the underground parking lot reserved for the main branch’s staff, Ibuki finally sat in his car, winced, and contemplated his life choices.  
Then contemplated the long night that had come before last.  
His voice, as always, was even.  
“Still worth it.”

**Author's Note:**

> You're welcome.
> 
> (Chrono not knowing his strength is hilarious to me okay? okay)


End file.
